With rising energy prices, concerns about the environment, and an increased emphasis on energy conservation, there has been an increased interest in the detection and prevention of electricity theft. Theft directly from a high voltage feeder can be done by the unauthorized installation of a non-utility owned distribution transformer on the feeder. The utility would not necessarily know about the existence of such a transformer and thus a comparison between energy supplied by the utility owned distribution transformers and the energy consumed by the end-users would not detect this kind of electricity theft. To detect this kind of theft, it is necessary to measure consumption at the feeder level. A feeder meter, according to the state of the art, measures energy supplied by the feeder. This requires multiplying voltage and current to determine power and integrating the power over a period of time to determine energy. Theft could be detected by comparing the energy supplied by the feeder with the energy supplied by the distribution transformers on that feeder. A major disadvantage of this approach is that the feeder meter must be designed and built for high voltage operation. High voltage devices are expensive and depending on the design, can be hazardous to install. Furthermore, voltage drops occur in every feeder due to current flow and line resistance, and these voltage drops are a source of measurement error in the comparison. Increased measurement error means that more feeder meters are needed for a given number of distribution transformers in order to be able to distinguish between measurement error and theft.
Configuration information is an important input to the theft detection equations. It is necessary to know which end-users are connected to which distribution transformers, and to know which distribution transformers are associated with which feeder meters and how. The traditional method of maintaining configuration information is to develop a series of maps showing the distribution system components and how they are interconnected. This is an expensive labour intensive process, and often these maps are not kept up-to-date.